Buried among the footnotes of the Supreme Court’s landmark August 1 verdict on sub-categorisation of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes is a name – Ravichandran Bathran. Bathran, according to the footnote that appears in Section D of the verdict written by Chief Justice of India D Y Chandrachud and Justice Manoj Misra, had authored a research paper, ‘The many omissions of a concept: Discrimination amongst Scheduled Castes’.
What the footnote, however, does not reveal is Bathran’s very struggle to break the shackles of the caste system and why he thinks sub-categorisation of Dalits for the purpose of reservation is important.
In Kotagiri town of Tamil Nadu’s Nilgiris district, where he lives, Bathran is known as ‘septic tank bhai’ – a reference to the job he does and also his religion. Bathran adopted Islam in 2022 and is now known by the name Raees Muhammad. “Like Dr B R Ambedkar adopted Buddhism, I adopted Islam,” says Bathran aka Muhammad.
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A post-doctoral fellow who worked in the University of Southampton, South Africa, and a PhD in ‘Language, Caste and Territory: Language spoken by scavenging castes in South India’ from the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad, Muhammad has for the past three years been cleaning septic tanks for a living.
In a way, sanitation is the occupation prescribed for his caste, the Arunthathiyars of Tamil Nadu, he says. “I realised there are people who employ Arunthathiyars and make money out of their back-breaking work. I felt, why not start a company,” says Muhammad, talking of how he started Kotagiri Septic Tank Cleaning Services Pvt Ltd in 2021.
Muhammad says he initially planned to mechanise the cleaning process to prevent people from entering septic tanks. That did not pan out. He realised not much investment has gone into innovations that could replace manual scavenging. “If someone has to enter a tank and clean it, I do not let my workers do it. I do it myself,” he says.
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Muhammad pays his cleaners Rs 30,000 and his drivers Rs 40,000 a month. He has also got a group medical insurance for all of them – with a premium of Rs 15,000 per annum. “While I have yearned for dignity in this profession, you cannot imagine how humiliating the work is,” he says. Once, a government official asked Muhammad why he, a Chakkiliyan (another name for the Arunthathiyar caste), had dared to call him on the phone. “I am a Chakkiliyan so I did not tell him that I have a post-doc,” he says.
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Before he took up septic tank cleaning, Muhammad had worked as an Assistant Professor at Madras University. He also used to run a YouTube channel named Dalit Camera. His mother Arukani and father Bathran both worked as sweepers and have supported him in all that he does, he says. His wife Karpagam Allimuthu is a councillor of the Kotagiri Town Panchayat.
“The teaching job was not fulfilling for me. I always wanted to do more for my community. I realised it’s important to mobilise Arunthathiyars,” Muhammad says, adding the Arunthathiyars badly need community leaders.
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Saying “the root of the caste system emerges from the toilets”, Muhammad quotes Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek. “As Zizek says, the structure of the toilet is very telling of the culture of a place. In India, toilets were once placed outside the houses. Toilets were always associated with people who were untouchables and outcastes,” he says.
He is hopeful that sub-categorisation of Scheduled Castes for the purpose of reservation will benefit Arunthathiyars, one of the most backward communities in Tamil Nadu who have faced discrimination and violence even at the hands of other Scheduled Caste communities.
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In Muhammad’s paper, which is mentioned in the footnotes of the Supreme Court judgment, he argues against Scheduled Castes being categorised as a hom*ogenous group. “The category of Dalit does not help in engaging with the issue of sanitation…the universal appeal of the nomenclature of Dalits could not account for sub-caste politics, and in due course the category of Dalit became a synonym of the middle-class SC category,” he says in the paper authored in the Economic and Political Weekly in 2016.
Referencing the paper, the judgment reads, “…In TN, when an Arunthathiyar man and a Paraiyar woman (both castes find a place in the Scheduled Caste list) eloped, the woman’s family allegedly raped the women of the man’s family in retaliation.”
Muhammad says a sub-categorisation of SCs will allow community members to avail of reservation within the larger SC quota in states other than Tamil Nadu. Two, it will start a debate on inter-caste atrocities.
“This is a landmark judgment. It’s revolutionary because I believe it will start a discussion on atrocities on the most untouchable of castes in the caste system,” Muhammad says.
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Currently when higher castes among Scheduled Castes commit atrocities on those lower than them in the caste spectrum, the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, does not apply. “Arunthathiyars can now call the discriminatory practices against them, including those carried out by other Dalits, illegal. The judgment recognises that inter-caste atrocities among Dalits are common,” he says.
Now that sub-caste reservation is set to be a reality, will Muhammad go back to teaching? “I don’t think so. Always, the last two buckets of excrements in the septic tank have to be cleaned by hand – my people’s hands. Till caste exists, caste occupations will continue. There is a need to rebel against that,” he says.
